Big Food Crisis Links Roundup

The past couple of months, we are suddenly hearing a great deal of panic over rising worldwide food prices and the spectre of global scarcity. Here is a collection of worthwhile reading material on the subject, from a variety of angles.

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March 6:

Jon Markman at MSN Money explains why "it's a good time to invest in agricultural stocks."

Most unusual about this phenomenon, according to BMO Financial Group strategist Don Coxe, is that until now, food crises in world history were regional concerns that arose from crop failures, war or pests. Once global trade of grains got going in the 19th century in a major way, food shortages in one country were ameliorated by imports, he said. What's happening now is a lack of supply everywhere at once.

Markman blames urbanization, income growth leading to increased meat consumption, and increased ethanol production... and recommends buying stock in Monsanto.

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March 11:

The BBC covers rising food prices in Egypt.

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March 14:

Rising wheat prices and their effect on one Kansas bakery, via The Ethicurean.

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March 19:

Tom Philpott at Grist warns of a potential fungal disaster: wheat stem rust.

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March 20:

Blog Food and Fuel America points out that, while input costs are increasing for the big food-processing corporations such as General Mills, somehow their profits are managing to rise significantly. How can this be? (I’ve read in several places that Cargill’s profits are up by more than 80% also.)

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The AP's Katherine Corcoran, covering rising world food prices, assures us:

In the long term, prices are expected to stabilize. Farmers will grow more grain for both fuel and food and eventually bring prices down. Already this is happening with wheat, with more crops to be planted in the U.S., Canada and Europe in the coming year.

Of course, this supply-will-adjust-to-demand argument assumes an infinite wealth of available land. For now, she does not deny the situation is dire.

Food costs worldwide spiked 23 percent from 2006 to 2007, according to the FAO. Grains went up 42 percent, oils 50 percent and dairy 80 percent.

Economists say that for the short term, government bailouts will have to be part of the answer to keep unrest at a minimum. In recent weeks, rising food prices sparked riots in the West African nations of Burkina Faso, where mobs torched buildings, and Cameroon, where at least four people died.

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March 21:

Tom Philpott takes on the financial and food crises together and gets seriously sensible:

The first thing I'd do is end the government's absurd, expensive, and myriad biofuel subsidies, which are jacking up food prices while providing little if any environmental benefit. According to one reckoning, the federal government has committed $92 billion between 2006 and 2012 to prop up biofuel production. Attracted by this government-guaranteed market, the very same investment banks and hedge funds that brought us the mortgage debacle are now buying and selling corn and soy futures, snatching profits while consumers gape at the price of grocery staples.

Pulling the plug would cause grain and soy prices to drop, bringing down food prices but hurting farmers. To limit the latter effect, the government could step in and buy excess grain and hold it, replenishing stocks that have fallen to all-time lows. That would keep farmers in business while also improving food security.

With the massive savings that would result, the government should invest in local and regional food-production infrastructure, which has been systematically dismantled by agribusiness over the past half-century. Such a program would not only provide consumers with a ready alternative to industrial food, but would also re-establish food as an engine for building wealth within communities -- and lessen its ecological footprint.

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April 9:

David Streitfeld at the NYT reports that high grain prices are motivating farmers to pull millions of acres of land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to leave uncultivated habitat for birds and other wildlife.

“We’re in a crisis here. Do we want to eat, or do we want to worry about the birds?” asked JR Paterakis, a Baltimore baker who said he was so distressed at a meeting last month with Edward T. Schafer, the agriculture secretary, that he stood up and started speaking “vehemently.”

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The Guardian covers potential risks to global stability posed by soaring food prices.

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April 16:

John Vidal of The Guardian writes an excellent short piece summarizing the new International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development [IAASTD] report and its relevance for the current food crisis.

Sixty countries backed by the World Bank and most UN bodies yesterday called for radical changes in world farming to avert increasing regional food shortages, escalating prices and growing environmental problems.

But in a move that has led to the US, UK, Australia and Canada not yet endorsing the report, the authors said GM technology was not a quick fix to feed the world's poor and argued that growing biofuel crops for automobiles threatened to increase worldwide malnutrition.

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April 18:

Gretchen Gordon at Food First points the finger at deregulation for the food system crisis. Another terrific piece.

The impact of all this deregulation was to replace local market access for the majority of small producers with global market access for a few global producers. Thanks to non-existent anti-trust enforcement and rampant vertical integration, we’ve reached a level of concentration in our global agriculture system that would make Standard Oil blush. Three companies—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge—control the vast majority of global grain trading, while Monsanto controls more than one-fifth of the global market in seeds. Consumers from Sioux City to Soweto are more and more dependent on fewer and fewer producers. By eliminating the breadth and diversity of the system, we’ve eliminated its ability to withstand shock or manipulation.

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April 21:

From the NYT business section… biotech takes advantage of growing desperation.

In Britain, the National Beef Association, which represents cattle farmers, issued a statement this month demanding that “all resistance” to [GE] crops “be abandoned immediately in response to shifts in world demand for food, the growing danger of global food shortages and the prospect of declining domestic animal production.”

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Take-home message? Industrial agriculture and the unregulated free market, dominated by a few big food corporations, have created the dire emergency that some of us have long anticipated. There's an opportunity here: the public, even in relatively wealthy countries, is suddenly paying attention to the food system, and may be open to new ideas and structures. But there's also a very great danger that the big players will convince a fearful populace that they must place their trust in the hands of "the experts" or face famine, and use the crisis merely to ramp up their own profits and wreak more destruction. Let us come down firmly and loudly in favor of opportunity.

[Update]:

April 27:

Grasshopper Planet by Devilstower at Daily Kos.

Some Old Business

I keep thinking someday I'll be more than an intermittent blogger, but will life ever stop kicking my ass on a more-or-less regular basis? Not likely. Anyhow, the loads of things I'd wanted to write about are piling up in the meanwhile, and a thoughtful piece on each and every one is just not going to happen. So I'll start throwing out some important links that have come my way in March, in acceptance of the fact that they're already beginning to moulder.

Oh, and I have every intention of a full blog design update, but when on earth is that going to happen?

Here are the first couple of stories, and then I must rush off again.

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From the March 1 NYT, Free Lunch Isn't Cool, So Some Students Go Hungry:

Lunchtime “is the best time to impress your peers,” said Lewis Geist, a senior at Balboa and its student body president. Being seen with a subsidized meal, he said, “lowers your status.”

San Francisco school officials are looking at ways to encourage more poor students to accept government-financed meals, including the possibility of introducing cashless cafeterias where all students are offered the same food choices and use debit cards or punch in codes on a keypad so that all students check out at the cashier in the same manner.

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Also from March 1 NYT... My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables):

Farmer Jack Hedin explains some of the bureaucratic barriers to converting commodity cropland to fruit and vegetable production.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

[...]

The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.

Not even the rain has such small hands

Those of us with school-aged children probably respond especially strongly to stories about child laborers around the world, children much like ours but without the protections of law or economic security against exploitation, abuse, and exhaustion. My six-year-old daughter has terrific manual dexterity and loves sewing and crafts. Right now she fits these pursuits into her limited free time between school and activities, comfortable regular meals and bedtimes. Under other circumstances, she might be putting in 16-hour days making beaded clothing for a pittance. It’s an unbearable thought.

The March 10 Forbes has an extensive article on child labor, mostly in agriculture, and in particular detailing the problems of the GE cottonseed industry, undertaken by Indian farmers contracted to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta. According to the article, there are between 12 and 50 million children under the age of 14 working in India.

Cottonseed farmer Talari Babu is a slim, wiry man dressed, when a reporter visited him, in black for a Hindu fast. "Children have small fingers, and so they can remove the buds very quickly," he says, while insisting that he no longer employs the underage. "They worked fast, much faster than the adults, and put in longer hours and didn't demand long breaks. Plus, I could shout at them and beat or threaten them if need be to get more work out of them." He could also tempt them with candy and cookies and movies at night. Babu says that pressure from Monsanto and the MV Foundation, an NGO in Andhra Pradesh backed by the Dutch nonprofit Hivos, forced him to quit using child labor.

But many farmers still use children for this delicate and dangerous work.

The pollination work lasts for 70 to 100 days and is followed by cotton-picking staggered over several months. Children's hands are ideal for the delicate work with stamens and pistils. Their bodies are no better at withstanding the poisons. At least once a week, says Davuluri Venkateshwarlu, head of Glocal, farmers spray the fields with pesticides like Nuvacron, banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and endosulfan, methomyl and Metasystox, considered by the EPA to be highly toxic. Venkateshwarlu ticks off the effects of overexposure: diarrhea, nausea, difficulty in breathing, convulsions, headaches and depression.

In other parts of India, children are producing GM tomato, eggplant, okra and chili seeds for the American market, again under heavy pesticide regimens, and earning 5 to 10 cents per hour. Other young kids are doing dangerous stone work in quarries, turning out decorative stones and cobbles for American yards and gardens. The garment industry, of course, is a familiar offender, as well as producers of handmade carpets and decorative items. Here’s one group of very young boys who live together in a tiny Delhi room room making sparkly picture frames with sequins and bits of glass:

In one such room, where the only piece of furniture is a low workbench, 10-year-old Akbar sits on the floor and mixes two powders into a doughy adhesive, his fingers blackened by the chemicals. Another boy spreads a thin layer of the mixture on a photo frame and a third, seated on his haunches, starts pasting tiny pieces of mirrors and sequins along the border. He sways back and forth, a habit most kids have developed to keep the blood flowing through their limbs as they sit for several hours. Decorating one 5-by-5-inch frame consumes six child-hours. The boys, who all live in the room and cook their own food here, typically work from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. for $76 a month. Many have teeth stained from cigarettes they smoke and tobacco they chew to relieve the tedium.

The whole article is worth reading.

While India has passed some limited child labor laws, they are only loosely enforced. Likewise, the many familiar corporations mentioned in the article—not only Monsanto and Syngenta, and Bayer, but the Gap, Lowe’s, Target, Ikea, Bloomingdale’s, and other importers of goods-- have policies against buying from contractors who exploit child labor. Clearly, having a policy on the books does not constitute sufficient oversight.

In the seed industry in particular, it is important to remember that a plant grown in the U.S. may still spring from seed harvested across the world by very young laborers, on behalf of companies who reap giant profits from the transaction.

One of many reasons to know where your food comes from.

Brief News & Links, 3/1/08

Seed-saving?

The Global Seed Vault was opened on February 26 in Svalbard, Norway.

Bored into the middle of a snow-topped Arctic mountain, the seed vault has as its goal the storing of every kind of seed from every collection on the planet. While the original seeds will remain in ordinary seed banks, the seed vault's stacked gray boxes will form a backup in case natural disaster or human error erase the seeds from the outside world.

Spain-based nonprofit GRAIN warns against overreliance on seed banks for conserving diversity while the world's farmers plant an increasingly uniform set of crops.

...relying solely on burying seeds in freezers is no answer. The world currently has 1,500 ex situ genebanks that are failing to save and preserve crop diversity. Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. [...]

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. [...] the system operates under the assumption that once the farmers' seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else and negotiating intellectual property and other rights over them is the business of governments and the seed industry itself.

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Action item:

The EPA has proposed a rule change eliminating required reporting of airborne ammonia and hydrogen sulfide emissions by factory farms. While manure pit emissions can cause respiratory and nervous system effects, the EPA has apparently come to the conclusion that reporting is "not useful."

See EPA page here.

The public comment period for this rule change ends March 28 (leave a comment here). Mine:

It is appropriate for airborne toxic emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which have been shown to potentially cause respiratory and nervous system health effects, to be reported regardless of which industry is the source. Reporting of emissions is not an undue "burden on farmers," where farms are of the size likely to endanger air quality. The reporting requirements in this matter should not be eased, and doing so would be both a threat to public health and an unnecessary giveaway to factory farms, which must be held responsible for their environmental and community impacts.

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Resource:

The Cornell Small Farms Program is offering a $200 online course for beginning farmers.

If we are ever to reclaim our country's tradition of small-scale farming, we will have to find innovative ways to educate a new generation of farmers in their work. Currently, the average age of U.S. farmers is 55, and only 6% are under 35.

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Debt relief for (very) small farmers:

India's latest national budget will completely cancel the farm loan debt of all farmers with less than 2 hectares of land, at a cost of $15 billion. While some farm groups feel the land-size cut-off is too small, 80 percent of Indian farmers work less than 1 hectare of land, and the farm sector employs more than 60 percent of the labor force.

On the other hand, farmers have to have had access to credit in the first place for debt forgiveness to be helpful.

"But look at the detailing!"

CTLiberal at DailyKos diaries more horrific sweatshop abuses perpetrated by contractors for the Gap in Delhi.

For those of us involved in this issue only as consumers, I'd call your attention to the following passage from the Observer article.

"Professor Sheotaj Singh, co-founder of the DSV, or Dayanand Shilpa Vidyalaya, a Delhi-based rehabilitation centre and school for rescued child workers, said he believed that as long as cut-price embroidered goods were sold in stores across Britain, America, continental Europe and elsewhere in the West, there would be a problem with unscrupulous subcontractors using children."

Please think about that (I am). We don't need to wait for the practices of the Gap, or any other company, to be "exposed" by the media. If we find a garment that has elaborate handwork (embroidery, beading, all the details that are in fashion now), and its price does not seem to reflect the labor involved, we have to assume that it wasn't made by someone being paid a fair wage.

Of course, the people who run the Gap aren't stupid either; they're experts who should certainly come to the same realization instead of hiding their heads in the sand. Even if they "didn't know," they knew, and they bear responsibility. But we bear responsibility too, when purchasing, to assess: am I paying a fair price for this item? If I'm not, what are the probable implications?

I'm accustomed to going through that thought process when purchasing food. Now I'll think harder about clothing. Especially the kind with all that ornamentation.

Something Old

A wonderful Barbara Kingsolver piece, featuring the marvelous Vandana Shiva, appeared in the September 30th Washington Post-- since this was the day my grandfather died, I missed it. A particularly startling assertion made by Shiva and new to me:

"Most of those who have moved off of farms are still working in the industry of creating food and bringing it to consumers: as cashiers, truck drivers, even the oil-rig workers who generate the fuels to run the trucks. Those jobs are all necessary to a travel-dependent, highly mechanized food system. And many of those jobs are menial, life-taking work, instead of the life-giving work of farming on the land. The analyses we have done show that no matter what, whether the system is highly technological or much more simple, about 50 to 60 percent of a population has to be involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service."

Huh, really? Take the poll I just put up above-- I'm curious. And think carefully: for instance, no, of course I don't work in any kind of food-related job, I work in a fisheries laboratory. Then I thought about it a little more. Our lab has been mostly dedicated to addressing whirling disease, a pathogen that's been decimating trout populations throughout the West. Why, indeed, do we care about trout populations? Partly because of concern for ecological ramifications, or love of sport fishing. But also because trout are a wild food resource still widely exploited by Westerners. Are we so removed from the idea that wild food is real "food" that trout don't count, whereas if I worked with a cattle disease I'd certainly have a consciousness of my role in feeding the country's population? So, yes, okay, I'm (still) in food service.

Other food-service jobs I've held: bakery assistant. Grocery cashier. If you take "feeding the population" literally, nursing home aide. Grill cook. Prep cook. Waitress. Hostess. The past seven years in fisheries. Plus substantial unpaid cooking and gardening. Shiva is right. How about you, dear reader?

My grandpa, by the way, was born to a farm family. Later he grew up and "moved off the farm" (though still a farm-owner), becoming a small-town independent banker and politician. Oh, except the money coming in to the bank was that of local farmers, and plenty of the voters and constituents were farmers too. He was still in food service.

Farming the Parking Garage

There was a superb article on urban farming a few weeks ago from In These Times. Thank you to OrangeClouds115 for bringing it to my attention. I maintain that the only sensible long-term land-use strategy is to cultivate our living spaces-- empty lots, rooftops, and lawns-- for food production; and, for those inhabiting "food deserts," justice demands equitable access to health and nutrition, green growing spaces... and pleasure in food.

House (R)s to Oppose Agriculture Committee's Farm Bill?

From Blog for Rural America:

Just today, House of Representatives Republican Minority Leader John Boehner announced that the House Republican Leadership would oppose the 2007 Farm Bill passed by the House Agriculture Committee last Thursday. From the Republican Leader's e-alert:

"In a sneak attack on American working families, House Democratic leaders have revealed they will pay for new spending in the 2007 farm bill by imposing a new tax increase that threatens more than 5 million American jobs..."

Their commentary:

This is big, big news. The Democrats are facing a serious fight within their own party over the farm bill, and by no means will Democrats vote unanimously for the bill. The Democratic leadership will certainly require Republican votes to pass a farm bill, perhaps a fairly substantial number of them. If the Republican leadership actively tells its members not to vote for the Agriculture Committee's farm bill, it will be difficult for a farm bill to pass. The type of amendments offered and approved on the floor could easily affect those votes, and this development alters the politics of the floor process. In fact, there is already speculation that the floor process, scheduled for tomorrow, will be postponed to deal with this.

Meanwhile, the White House is threatening to veto it.

A large part of the problem, apparently, has to do with funding for nutrition programs, including the increase in minimum food stamp benefit I wrote about a few days ago. In order for the $4 billion worth of programs to be implemented, offsets had to be found; the Ways and Means Committee has been considering sources for that funding. When Committee member Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) proposed paying for nutrition programs by taxing overseas businesses with U.S. subsidiaries, that's apparently when all hell broke loose.

So now the whole Farm Bill is in danger. It's supposed to go to the floor tomorrow-- we'll see. This gets more and more interesting.

[Update]: Mulch is running frequent updates on today's Farm Bill blow-up over funding for nutrition programs. There are apparently a lot of international corporations who deeply object to Rep. Doggett's proposal.

Food Stamps: Forget $1/meal, try 18 cents

Earlier this spring, we saw many well-publicized efforts by Congresspeople and other public figures to eat, for one week, on average food stamp benefits. The average benefit is $21/week, or-- as many pointed out-- $1/meal. Some blogged their experience, and the results are definitely worth reading. Rep. Barbara Lee's (D-CA) and others' can be found here. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH)'s is here. More can be accessed via the first link in this post.

Nevertheless, for many individuals-- mostly elderly and disabled singles-- the benefit is much, much lower. Currently, $10 per month. That's been the minimum benefit since 1977, and about 10% of food stamp households receive it. $10 a month. That's about 11 cents per meal.

So, the people who receive such piddly benefits aren't really poor, right? Not according to this fact sheet from the Food Research and Action Center. In fact, the majority of households receiving the minimum benefit have incomes below the poverty level.

Furthermore, many eligible households don't bother even applying, given that the reward for all that bureaucratic hassle is so small. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says:

"Fewer than one-third of households with seniors who are eligible for food stamps receive them, according to USDA estimates. Groups that work with senior citizens report that many seniors believe they will receive only $10 a month and that the small benefit is not worth the hassle (often including trips to, and long waits at, food stamp offices) and paperwork of applying for and maintaining food stamp benefits."

30 years ago, $10 bought about three times as much, grocery-wise, as it does now. The value of the minimum benefit has plummeted, and most parties agreed it was time for an update. Enter the 2007 Farm Bill. High hopes.

Well, the marked-up bill that came out of the House Agriculture Committee yesterday did raise the minimum benefit. Hooray! Instead of 10 dollars, the minimum benefit is now 10 percent of the maximum benefit for a household of one... and the maximum benefit gets adjusted, over time, to inflation. Here’s a .pdf of the en bloc amendment containing the minimum benefit increase (the relevant bit is on page 9).

Good news, yes? Well, yes. Unfortunately, the new formula only yields a minimum benefit of, now, 16 dollars per month for 2008. Still only half, in real terms, of what it was in 1977. Still only 18 cents a meal. Is this good enough? I don't think so.

The Farm Bill goes to the House floor Thursday, and amendments have to be submitted by Tuesday evening. If anyone knows of a planned amendment that would further raise the minimum benefit, please post that information.

If I had to, I could probably figure out a way to eat for $1/meal. Not $0.18, though. Could you?